Building on new research from the IRC on positive market conditions in Cox’s Bazar, this brief highlights the untapped potential of livelihoods programming to increase self-reliance and economic empowerment for affected communities.

A new report from the International Rescue Committee indicates that the world’s refugee population is absent from the Sustainable Development Goals, despite having increased 47% since the SDGs were adopted in 2015.

This is one of five publications where we outline steps for developing a medium-term plan for Bangladesh, to benefit refugees and their host community alike. The other four cover forest and landscape restoration, trade, private sector investment, and labor mobility.

Current agency policies and practices are profoundly restricting the ability of eligible individuals to naturalize.

The crisis in Venezuela and its regional impact are continuing unabated, driving displacement on a pace and scale that requires greater action from the international community. The Solidarity Conference, scheduled for October 28-29 in Brussels, is an opportunity to apply the lessons learned from other displacement crises, mobilize resources and promote policies that can protect displaced Venezuelans and host communities today and turn the crisis into a development opportunity tomorrow.

Gender Based Violence is a global epidemic. The IRC estimates that 14 million refugees and displaced women and girls were subjected to sexual violence in 2019. However less than 0.2% of all global humanitarian funding between 2016-2018 was allocated to GBV prevention and response, and women and girls are often invisible in country's action plans for the Sustainable Development Goals. This report highlights some of the links between GBV and key SDGs to show where GBV prevention and response needs to be integrated across sectors to address the double disadvantage faced by women and girls in crisis.

In 2018, the IRC assisted over 120,000 Syrian refugees and low-income Jordanians to access healthcare, protection, education and income generation opportunities. One of the recent changes that IRC staff have noticed is that Syrian women are taking on more of an income earning role than was the norm back in Syria and that this is creating changes in household dynamics.

Almost one year since the Stockholm agreement, the war in Yemen continues unabated. New IRC report highlights the devastating impact of continued conflict on ordinary Yemenis. The international community must push the warring parties to build on a rare window of opportunity for peace to secure a nationwide ceasefire.

The geography of poverty is changing. Extreme poverty is increasingly concentrated in places characterized by fragility and violent conflict: by 2030, 85 percent of the extreme poor—some 342 million people—will live in fragile and conflict-affected states.1 Yet just one in five fragile states are on track to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).2 Meaningful progress on the goal of reducing global extreme poverty requires meeting the development needs of vulnerable populations in fragile contexts; but assistance in these contexts has traditionally been limited to short-term humanitarian aid, ill-equipped to address underlying development challenges. World Bank leadership, staff, and shareholders recognize that protracted crises and associated mass displacement and chronic extreme hunger, as well as threats from sudden-onset emergencies such as climate disasters and pandemics, threaten development progress. Driving progress in these complex environments is the only way that the World Bank will meet its twin goals of reducing global poverty and improving shared prosperity, and address the underlying drivers of some of the world’s most protracted crises.

This briefing assesses the impact of the law on refugee women’s right to work and access economic opportunities in high refugee hosting countries.